THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE.
Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the
quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in
early days and there were stranded for life. He had another name, no
doubt, but nobody knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have
forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for
which names were invented, was easy to pronounce, and therefore was all
the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided,
slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the
little scraps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy
and unacquainted with soap as an Indian.
Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. When there were no tourists
about to whom he could tell bear stories, he would go into the woods
and have adventures with bears and stock up with stories for the next
season. Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out of him. He
brought in no bear skins, pointed out no bullet holes, exhibited no
scars and told no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and
hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears appeared to have an
understanding that there was room enough in the woods for both and that
his hunting was all in the way of innocent amusement and recreation, to
be spiced now and then with a practical joke.
"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable folks," Pike used to say in
his Californianized-Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing mean about
'em and they don't go around with chips on their shoulders. I
generally get along with them slick as grease and they never try to
jump me when I haven't got a gun. Why, sir, I can just talk a brown
bear out of the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I did one night
in the valley. I was going from Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I
ran right up against a big brown bear in the dark. He was coming down
the road and was in pretty considerable of a hurry, too--going down to
the butcher's corral for supper I reckon--and we stopped about three
feet apart. 'What you adoin' of here,' says I. 'Seems to me you're
prowling around mighty permiscuous, buntin' inter people on the State
stage road. You git inter the bresh,' says I, 'where you belong or
I'll kick a few dents into you. Now don't stand here argifying the
pint,' says I, just as important as if I was the Gardeen of the Valley,
which I wasn't. 'Scoot, skedaddle, vamoos the ranch, git off the
earth,' I says, 'if you ain't aimin' to git your head punched.'
"Well, sir, he stood there a minute with his head cocked sidewise,
kinder grunted once as if he was saying 'good-night,' and turned off
the road into the brush and went about his business, and I poked along
up to the Stoneman. 'Course I can't swear that he knew just what I
said, but he ketched the general drift of the argyment all right, what
you might call the prepoort of my remarks, and he knowed he hadn't no
case worth fighting about.
"I remember once when Jim Duncan and me was ketched out in a snowstorm
up near the head of Alder Creek, and lost each other in the dark. I
knew Jim would take care of himself and it was no use tramping around,
so I hunted a hole to sleep in. I found a place under a rock just big
enough for me, where the snow didn't blow in, and I curled up on some
dry leaves and snoozed off in no time. By and by something touched my
face and I woke up, and there was a bear poking his head in and
wondering if there was room for two. There wasn't no room and I don't
like to sleep with bears nohow. Bears are all right in their place and
I don't hold to no prejudices, but I'm notional about some things and I
never could stand bears in my bed; they smell worse than Indians. So I
says to that bear, which was looking mighty wishful into my snug
quarters, 'Git along out of this; I was here first,' and I reached up
and fetched him a back-handed slap on the nose. You'd orter heard him
sneeze as he moseyed off. Last thing I remembered when I turned over
and went to sleep was him a sneezing as he wandered around looking for
another hole.
"If that had been a she-bear, of course I'd have crawled out and gave
her my place like a gentleman. You never know what a she--bear, or any
other kind of she, is going to do next, and the best way to get along
with 'em is to let 'em have their own way and be polite. I'm always
polite to ladies--or most always any way. Of course when they get too
cantankerous a man has to forget his manners and call 'em down.
"I was impolite to a she-bear once, but she got back at me. I was over
on the far side of Signal Peak hunting gray squirrels with a shot-gun.
I heard a funny sort of squealing a little way off, and set out to find
out what was going on in the woods. Poking quietly through the brush,
I came to the top of a ledge that dropped off straight and smooth to a
flat covered with bear clover, just an opening in the forest. A
she-bear was busy cracking open sugar pine cones and showing two cubs
how to get the nuts out of them. The little fellows were having a gay
old time, wrestling, boxing, stealing nuts from mamma and rolling about
in the clover like a couple of kids, and I laid down in some bushes on
top of the ledge and watched them. Sometimes they would grab a cone
from the old one or bite her ear, and she would scold them and cuff
them until they yelped that they'd be good. They couldn't be good half
a minute, and they had the old lady's patience most worn out before I
took a hand in the frolic.
"The old bear's coat was pretty thin and rusty, and she'd been sitting
down or coasting down a bear slide so much that all the hair was worn
off her hams slick and smooth. She looked mighty ridiculous when her
back was turned, and it came into my fool head that a charge of small
shot in the smooth place would be mighty surprising to her and help out
the fun a whole lot. She couldn't get at me on the ledge, so I was
perfectly safe to play jokes on her, and I wanted to see her jump. So
I shoved the gun out through a bush and turned it loose. She was sixty
yards away and the shot stung her good without doing any great harm.
"'Woof!' said the old bear as she jumped four feet high, and when she
lit she was as mad as a wet hen. She looked up at the ledge, but
couldn't see me, and she looked all around for somebody or something to
blame for her trouble. Not a thing was in sight to account for it.
She sat down sort of sideways, reached around with one paw to scratch
where it hurt and thought the matter over. I had to stuff grass in my
mouth to keep from howling with laughter at the way she cocked her head
and seemed to be sizing up the situation while she scratched the
stinging place.
"The cubs had stopped playing at the sound of the gun and run up close
to her, and they were watching her for further orders. The old girl
finally got her eye on them, and she looked at them solemnly for half a
minute, and it was plain as print she was beginning to have suspicions.
Then she was sure she had the thing figured out, and she fetched first
one and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling ten feet away.
When they got up bawling she was right there and gave them the darndest
spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every time she hit one he would
go heels over head and yell blue murder, and by the time he got up she
gave him another belt, scolding like an old woman all the time. It
seemed to me I could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your mammy,
will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along home without your supper, ye little
scamps, and take that.' And so she went through the woods; spanking
her babies, and they a'yelling for keeps and not knowing what they were
being licked for, and I rolled around on top of the ledge, kicking my
heels in the air and just bellowing with laughter.
"I thought that was the end of the funniest time I ever had with a
bear, but it wasn't. Along about the first of March there was a warm
spell in the mountains, and I went down the South Fork to Devil's
Gulch, which heads up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber claim
and see if it was worth taking up. It was one of those warm days that
take the snap out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep under a
tree. When I waked a bear had me half covered up with leaves and was
piling on more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any covering, but she
seemed to think I did, and I reckoned the best thing to do was to keep
still and let her finish the job. She seemed so serious about it that
I didn't dare take it as a joke and try any tricks on her, but I
couldn't figure out what her game was. She covered me with oak leaves,
pine-needles and dirt from head to foot, and then all was still. I
couldn't see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and shake off the
leaves.
"After a while I made up my mind to take some chances to find out if
the bear was on watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing happened, so I
wiggled it a little harder. Then I felt around slowly until I got hold
of my gun, and when I had that where I could handle it, I jumped up and
shook the leaves and dirt from my face. The bear was gone. I had a
sort of notion of what she was driving at, and so I fixed up the pile
of leaves just as she had left them, went up the hill a little way and
shinned a tree.
"About half an hour later the bear came back, leading two half-grown
cubs so thin you could count their slats, and I recognized the
interesting family I had met and had fun with in the fall. She was
saying things to them in bear-talk, sort of whining and grunting, and
they wobbled along behind her up to that pile of leaves. The cubs laid
down with their tongues hanging out as if they were pretty tired, and
the old girl tackled the pile confidently. It was plain enough that
she had cached me for dinner, gone home into the gulch after the cubs
and brought them back to have a square meal after being holed up for
two or three months.
"The old bear made only two or three dabs at the pile when she began to
suspect something was wrong, and then she sailed into it like a steam
shovel. She made leaves and dirt fly so fast out between her hind legs
that the cubs had to get out of the way or be buried, and the more she
dug, the more excited she got. She worked over that pile and all the
ground for ten feet around it until she was down to the frost, and when
she finally got it through her head that the cupboard was bare, she was
the most foolish-looking critter a man ever saw. She stood there
blinking at the cubs, who were sniffing at the rubbish she had
scattered about, and couldn't explain to them what had become of that
square meal, and I reckon the cubs had it put up that mamma was getting
light-headed and having dreams. They quit prospecting and sat down and
looked at her and whined, and that set her off again raking over all
the leaves in the neighborhood as if she hoped to find me hiding under
them. Pretty soon she struck some kind of a root that was good to eat,
and she braced up and called the cubs and showed it to 'em as if that
was what she had been hunting for all the time. She made more fuss
over that root than there was any call for and pretended it was the
greatest thing a bear ever struck in the woods, and the cubs were so
glad to get anything that they allowed roots were good enough and
forgot all about what she had promised them.
"If her pelt had been good and the cubs had been big enough, I reckon
I'd have got even with her for caching me, but she wasn't worth
skinning and the cubs were no good for grub. It was getting late and I
was tired of my tree, so I ploughed up the dirt under her nose with a
load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded those cubs off into the
brush and lit out for Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the
nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears."